In the past two decades, a number of outstanding monographs have
explored the phenomenon of child abandonment and the significance of
foundling homes in the European past. (1) More recently, historians of
Latin America have turned their attention to these institutions, which
appeared with increasing frequency in urban centers across the
hemisphere in the late eighteenth century. (2) While conclusive
generalizations about the nature of child abandonment in Latin America
are somewhat premature given the current paucity of research, one issue
deserving further inquiry has already emerged. In a recent history of
child abandonment in Brazil, Maria Luiza Marcilio observes, "the
informal or private rearing of foundlings in family homes was the widest
system of protection of abandoned children, present throughout the
history of Brazil. It is this [system] that, in some sense, renders
original the history of assistance to abandoned children in the
country." (3)

Marcilio's provocative observation about the historical
significance of informal modes of assistance in Brazil can probably be
extended to many other parts of Latin America as well. As a small but
growing ethnographic and historical literature has revealed, poor,
abandoned, and illegitimate minors in Latin American and Caribbean
societies, from the colonial period into the twentieth century, have
often been informally reared in casas ajenas--other peoples' homes.
(4) Their presence in non-natal households reflects the ubiquity of
fosterage, adoption, apprenticeship, and child domestic labor--diverse
but overlapping practices I refer to collectively as child circulation.
Thus, the foundling homes of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Rio de
Janeiro and Salvador da Bahia, Mexico City and Santiago de Chile that,
like their European counterparts, received legions of abandoned
youngsters, operated within broad informal systems of child circulation.
(5)

We have little sense, however, of how these asylums fit into
general systems of child circulation in specific historical contexts.
(6) Indeed, after acknowledging the importance of the informal sphere,
even Marcilio herself spends only a few pages on the topic before
returning to a discussion of orphanages; the dearth of sources on what
have traditionally been private practices, she notes, hampers a more
comprehensive treatment. Her observation therefore poses the question:
How did foundling homes, or what might be characterized as
"formal," "institutional" or "public"
modes of child circulation, interface with the "informal,"
"extra-institutional" or "private" cultures and
practices of circulation present in many Latin American societies? These
questions are of interest not only because they may illuminate the role
of foundling homes and the nature of child circulation in the Latin
American context. They also have the potential to shed light on the
broad historical evolution of welfare provision in its informal and
institutionalized guises and, by extension, on the very relationship
between private practices and public authority.

To the extent that the relationship between institutional and
informal modes of circulation is considered at all in the
historiography, European or Latin American, there is a prevailing
tendency to contrast them as discrete and mutually exclusive. This
tendency may well derive from John Boswell's The Kindness of
Strangers, one of the only studies to focus on informal modes of child
abandonment. (7) Erudite and methodologically innovative, Boswell's
study explores child abandonment in Europe prior to the rise of the
foundling home. He argues that the legions of abandoned youngsters in
the societies of late antiquity and medieval Europe were succored by the
"kindness of strangers" who incorporated these children into
their households, monastic communities, and lineages. He contrasts their
situation with that of abandoned children after the thirteenth or
fourteenth century, when hospitals and later specially designated
foundling homes displaced more informal modes of provision. The
institutionalization of welfare was catastrophic because of the
extremely high rates of mortality that typically characterized these
asylums. A number of scholars have taken issue with Boswell's
interpretation, questioning whether it presents a misleadingly rosy
portrait of the fate of unwanted children in the ancient world. (8)
Still, the basic distinction between "interpersonal" child
abandonment and abandonment "mediated by institutions," which
Boswell implicitly treats as discrete, mutually exclusive, and
chronologically sequential phenomena, remains unexamined. (9)

The present article seeks to reexamine the relationship between
informal and institutional mechanisms from the perspective of an
orphanage far removed in time and place from those of medieval Europe:
the Casa de Huerfanos, the largest and most important welfare
institution in Santiago, Chile, in the late nineteenth century. The
everyday modus operandi of the Chilean Casa, as the asylum was known,
reveals the complex interdependence of informal and institutional
mechanisms for receiving and rearing abandoned children.

Like other studies of foundling homes, my analysis draws on the
extraordinarily rich documentation regarding its quotidian activities
generated by the orphanage itself. In addition, I also make use of
extra-institutional documentation, including judicial and notarial records, in order to reconstruct the context of popular beliefs about
and practices of child circulation within which the public institution
functioned. Through an analysis of these sources, I show how
Santiago's Casa de Huerfanos complemented and was interconnected
with much wider and deeper informal circuits of child redistribution.
What is more, parents and caretakers apparently recurred to the
institution in order to subsidize and formalize otherwise
extra-institutional or "private" fostering arrangements. In
turn, the social relationships over which the Casa presided were in many
ways indistinguishable from those associated with informal fostering.
Such observations lead me to conclude that, far from supplanting informal modes of care, the asylum actually relied on the kindness--and
self-interest--of private households of all social stations to assist
the legions of poor, orphaned, and abandoned youngsters it received. In
other words, instead of displacing "traditional," informal
modes of charity, the expanding public welfare apparatus of the late
nineteenth century actually reproduced, reinscribed, and perhaps in some
measure legitimated informal practices.

Child circulation in popular culture

Child circulation in late-nineteenth-century Chile encompassed a
diverse constellation of practices involving minors who were mandados
criar, literally "sent out to be reared," by unrelated
caretakers. Often it was the illegitimate, orphaned, and abandoned who
were mandados criar, but above all, this was a practice involving the
children of the poor. While any generalization must remain somewhat
tentative given the dearth of studies of childhood in Latin America, it
appears that while the legitimate offspring of elites were reared in the
households of their progenitors (or in cases of orphanhood, in the
households of close relatives), poor children were often nursed, reared,
apprenticed, and "rented" for service in the households of
others. (10)

Historians have noted the difficulty of accessing the lives of
children in the historical record. It is perhaps surprising, then, that
the circulation of minors in Chile is so vividly, if incompletely,
illuminated in the sources. (11) For example, census inventories of
household composition record the presence of unrelated children. And
wills turn out to be a useful source for reconstructing patterns of
child circulation because testators often left bequests to individuals
whom they had reared. (12) But perhaps the richest source of all are the
narratives of everyday domestic life recounted in
late-nineteenth-century Chilean courtrooms. Courts encountered
circulating children in a number of different contexts. They mediated
disputes over the custody of these minors and were called upon to
evaluate the costs of a child's crianza, or rearing, against the
value of his or her labor to the foster household. In a variety of
circumstances, as when fostered children ran away, judicial authorities
also considered the nature of rights enjoyed by individuals over minors
whom they reared, pondering whether caretakers exercised paternal authority over their wards. Courts also heard criminal cases involving
the abuse and neglect of youngsters in non-natal households.

All these cases shed light on the quotidian beliefs and practices
associated with child circulation. And even when the investigative
spotlight did not focus on these children per se, they are often there,
in the penumbra of the documentary record, being nursed on the stoop,
running errands in the streets, coming of age in humble shacks or in the
servants' patios of elite homes. So familiar was their presence in
households, neighborhoods, and communities that they rarely provoked
comment from either local people or judicial authorities. From the
historian's perspective, what is remarkable about these children is
how utterly unremarkable they were for their contemporaries.

Is it possible, based on such documentation, to quantify the
magnitude of child circulation in nineteenth-century Chile? Using census
manuscripts, historian Rene Salinas found that among villagers in the
rural department of Los Andes, Chile, in the 1840s, 17 percent of the
total recorded population of minors lived with people other than their
parents. (13) The calculation likely underestimates the phenomenon,
however, given that some fostered minors were probably recorded as sons
and daughters of the households where they resided. Moreover, the
proportion of children in this community who had ever lived in such an
arrangement, as opposed to those doing so at the particular moment the
census was recorded, was surely much higher.

Wills also indicate that the practice was widespread. In a sample
of eighty-five wills recorded in the year 1850 by Santiago notaries,
almost 17 percent of testators made a bequest to un nino que he criado,
a child whom they had reared. In the same year, in the provincial
department of San Felipe, located some 90 km north of Santiago, no less
than one in four testators made such provisions (16 of 65 wills). Again,
such figures probably underestimate the presence of unrelated children
in testators' households, given that testators did not always
specify their relationship to beneficiaries in their wills. And of
course people may have reared children without choosing to leave them
anything. (14) Wills also appear to document the decline of child
circulation: by the turn of the twentieth century, references to foster
children disappear from testaments in both Santiago and San Felipe. I
will return to this intriguing but ambiguous observation later on.

In addition to providing a sense of the magnitude of child
circulation, wills and judicial records illustrate the functions and
meanings of the myriad child-rearing arrangements and modes of family
formation that existed in nineteenth-century Chile. Specifically, these
sources illuminate why some parents chose to give up their children as
well as why other individuals chose to take them in.

Wet nursing arrangements constituted one crucial vector of child
circulation. Wealthy mothers in nineteenth-century Chile, as elsewhere
in Latin America, rarely nursed their own infants, routinely hiring poor
women as live-in wet nurses instead. The nurses, who earned wages
rivaling any other female occupation, in turn passed their own children
on to be cared for by women as poor or poorer than themselves. Around
1880, Rozenda Acevedo left her rural community of Codegua to work as a
wet nurse for a wealthy family in Santiago. She entrusted her
illegitimate infant son, Luis Alberto Acevedo, to a woman whose family
were tenants of a local hacienda. Such arrangements could be temporary,
but some children remained in the care of their wet nurses for years.
Luis Alberto continued to live with his foster family until he died at
age five. His mother left one year's anticipated salary for his wet
nurse, but according to witnesses, had not been heard from since. (15)

Late nineteenth-century Chilean doctors, like their counterparts
elsewhere in Latin America and Europe, spilled considerable ink
condemning wet nursing as a cause of infant mortality because employment
as nurses prompted poor mothers to abandon their own children. But wet
nursing was merely the most visible motor of abandonment. What elite
commentators did not acknowledge was that live-in domestic service in
general was implicated in this dynamic. Domestic service accounted for
perhaps forty percent of all recorded female employment in Chile in the
late nineteenth century. (16) Because the children of domestics were
rarely permitted to reside in the households where their mothers worked,
these children too were passed on to other caretakers. Thus, the
circulation of poor minors was inseparable from the market for
women's domestic labor.

Poverty and the nature of domestic service fueled child
circulation, but so too did illegitimacy. As elsewhere in Latin America,
illegitimacy was rampant in Chile. In the final decade of the nineteenth
century, some 30 percent of children were born out of wedlock; by the
first decade of the twentieth century, the number had increased to 40
percent. In the case of poor children, it is impossible to separate out
the relative weight of illegitimacy, maternal poverty, and the
exigencies of female domestic labor as factors explaining circulation.
For poor women on their own--and female headship was ubiquitous in
nineteenth-century Chile--the three conditions were all too often
inextricably interrelated and mutually reinforcing. The Civil Code of
1857, which prohibited paternity investigation, thereby placing the
legal onus for rearing illegitimate children solely on mothers, probably
exacerbated maternal poverty and fueled child circulation. (17)

In the case of elite parents, it is easier to disaggregate the role
of illegitimacy in the dynamics of circulation. Among these sectors,
offspring whose out-of-wedlock birth threatened the honor and patrimony of family members could be fostered out to alternative caretakers. Many
elite, illegitimate fathers sent their children to be reared in
anonymity in others' households, often those of their dependents.
(18)

Of course, viewed from the perspective of those who took them in,
children were less burdens on wage-earning mothers or liabilities for
elite, illegitimate parents than they were objects of emotional or
economic value enthusiastically sought by caretakers. Childless couples
were one such group. Valparaiso shoemaker Jose Tapia and his wife, who
informally adopted a young boy in 1862, were one such couple. Tapia
explained how, "Privately and in the confessional ... [a Jesuit
friar] asked if he could give me an orphan boy ... I discussed it with
my wife who insisted that I accept the offer of the friar, and since we
did not have children of our own, we would take care of this defenseless
boy and adopt him as our son." Five years later, the boy still
lived with Tapia and his wife, who according to witnesses treated him
"the same as if he had been their son." The youngster also
served as an apprentice to Tapia. His role as both son and apprentice
was not necessarily a contradiction: it merely reveals that children
could be simultaneously imbued with affective and material value in
social sectors in which the labor of minors was an important component
of the household economy. (19)

Another group that frequently sought out parentless children were
older women of modest means, especially those who were widowed, never
married, childless, or otherwise alone. Such women desired to take in
youngsters who would "accompany" them, offer
"comfort," and serve as "companions," as
contemporaries commonly phrased the role. In addition to providing
companionship--which probably also entailed domestic service in many
cases--such children represented a form of social security for women on
their own in their old age. Take Dolores Gonzalez, who in her 1875 will
identified herself as single, 65 years old, and a native and resident of
the small town of Quillota. She declared, "Since his earliest years
I have reared and had by my side a young man named Segundo Gonzalez ...
who at present is about 26 years old, [and] who has served me and cared
for me like the most faithful of sons ... maintaining me with the
products of his industry and work." She named the young man
executor of her will and instituted him as the sole and universal heir
of her modest estate. (20) He also acquired his adoptive mother's
last name. As an unmarried woman with no children, Dolores Gonzalez had
taken in the orphaned or abandoned Segundo at around age forty. She may
well have done so with an eye to the companionship and material support
the young man could provide in her old age. If this was the case, the
intergenerational symbiosis had apparently worked out well, both for the
once-vulnerable youngster without a family and the soon-to-be vulnerable
aging woman on her own. Given the high rates of childlessness prevailing
in this society--a third or more of late-nineteenth-century Chilean
testators had no living offspring--such scenarios must have been common.
(21)

All of these arrangements relieved strapped families, working
mothers, or unwilling illegitimate parents of the burden of their care
even as they provided minors to households in which children were
lacking. Some circulating youngsters passed their childhood in a single
home while others moved perpetually from family to family. Some were
eventually reclaimed by their progenitors, while others definitively
lost contact with their families of origin and even knowledge of their
natal identities. The most fortunate minors could become objects of love
and affection in their new families. They could, as in the case of
Segundo Gonzalez, cited above, acquire the legal status of heir and the
social role of son or daughter.

But the appellations "son" and "daughter,"
particularly as they applied to fostered children, were deeply
ambiguous. For being the hijo or hija of one's adoptive family
could imply not just incorporation as a valued son or daughter, and
heir, of the household. It could also imply a servant's filial subordination to a father-master or mother-mistress--a rhetoric of
kinship that naturalized relations of dependence. The advice proffered
to upper-class women in an 1891 guidebook entitled Deberes de la Mujer
Cristiana ("Duties of the Christian Woman") reflects this
alternative meaning. The author, a presbiter, counseled his readers:
"The mistresses of the household are, in a sense, the parents of
their servants, above all if the latter have been reared by them; so
they should treat them as daughters, look upon them with affection and
compassion." As for the servant herself, "the young Christian
woman who is contracted in service to other people should treat her
masters as parents, and regard them with respect, submission, care, and
obedience." (22)

Such advice reveals the other face of child circulation: the social
complex of dependence, subordination, and servitude in which the
practice was embedded and which it served to reproduce. From the age of
six or seven, the point at which productive life was widely regarded to
begin for the lower classes, poor children were routinely sent out to
other households to be "educated" or to work as
servants--activities that were in practice one and the same. Their
productive tasks frequently assigned in accord with their sex, children
ran errands for shopkeepers and households, did housework, cared for
infants, and ironed and washed clothes. In the countryside, they also
worked the harvest, served as shepherds, and chopped wood. The elite
female readers of the guidebook were not the only ones to receive such
young workers. Even humble households sought out the labor of abandoned,
unwanted, or orphaned children. Residence in a guardian's household
provided children with the practical experience that prepared them for
future servitude, or, if they were lucky, artisanal or agricultural
skills. It also initiated them into the patronage networks that would
prove crucial for making a living and getting by in a society organized
around relations of dependence.

But if early insertion into the labor market was the rule for most
poor children, some suffered a particularly acute form of exploitation.
Some caretakers evidently "adopted" infants with the
deliberate purpose of grooming them for future service. The life story
of the servant Maria Ramirez, illuminated during the course of a
criminal investigation lodged against her in the 1890s, is illustrative.
According to her mistress, Ramirez had been taken in at ten months of
age. Reared in the woman's household, she labored as an unpaid
domestic until the age of twenty or so, when she ran away, allegedly
with some of her mistress's jewelry. (23) Ramirez's experience
of lifelong servitude is echoed in notarial documentation, like the will
of one Curico smallholder in 1858 who left a few sheep and calves to
"my three domestics whom I reared." (24)

It is likely that the animals were the only form of remuneration
these domestics ever received. For children reared in such arrangements
were generally not paid once they reached working age; it was understood
that their labor served merely to compensate their guardians for the
expense of their upbringing. The commonly used term criado/a, which
meant a servant, maid, or household dependent but also "one who is
reared" (from criar, to rear or nurse), captures the slippage between the roles of domestic servant and foster child. In an
exquisitely tuned cycle of subordination, masters and mistresses might
rear, and maintain in their employ, the children of their servants. (25)
Such scenarios suggest that practices of informal fostering could serve
to ensure the multi-generational reproduction of dependence. They
further indicate that patterns of child circulation in Latin America
that endured into the twentieth century could resemble less the
lifecycle apprenticeship of early modern Europe than they did a de facto slavery. (26)

Another aspect of their subordination is that childrens' natal
origins could be erased in the process of their circulation. Some
children came of age in others' households with little or no
knowledge of their parents, their family identity, or their natal names.
When asked to identify herself before the judge, Maria Ramirez, the
servant accused of theft, declared: "I do not know my surnames
because according to what I have heard I was brought from Araucania [to
Santiago] and the last name I use is that of my patrones...." The
adoption of a new surname could reflect a child's incorporation
into his or her adoptive family as it did for Segundo Gonzalez, the
"faithful son" and heir of the testator Dolores Gonzalez. But
for Maria Ramirez, it was a symbol of alienation, not belonging. What
she did upon leaving the household where she had lived and labored
during her entire life is revealing: she shed the only last name she
knew and assumed another one, thereby rejecting the family identity that
had been imposed on her by her mistress.

Meanwhile, evidence from criminal courts illustrates the potential
for more routine forms of violence inherent in these arrangements.
Masters and mistresses were charged with the abuse, neglect, starvation,
and in several cases, even murder of their young criados. But while
physical violence may have pervaded these relationships, it was not what
sustained them. The courts and the press tended to condemn those who
exercised extreme violence against young children. (27) Far more
powerful in sustaining this complex of subordination between patrones
and criados were cultural ideologies of paternalism and Christian
charity.

According to prevailing cultural discourses, households who took in
the orphaned and abandoned exercised a laudable act of benevolence.
Caretakers routinely characterized the presence of unrelated children in
their homes as "an act of charity" or explained that they had
been moved to receive such minors "out of a feeling of
charity." (28) It was understood that the children who benefited
from such benevolence contracted a profound debt with their
caretakers--one that would be repaid with their loyalty and
subordinance. The logic of charity given, debts incurred, and gratitude
owed structured the everyday relationship between youngsters and the
individuals who raised them. When testators stipulated bequests to
children whom they had reared, they cited the beneficiaries'
"fidelity." (29) Conflicts between children and benefactors
also tended to revolve around this discursive axis. Jose Ramon Vidaurre
complained that the daughter of a servant whom he and his wife had
"received and given shelter to in our home" throughout her
childhood had forgotten "the affection and gratitude that she owes
her protectors" when she claimed to be the couple's daughter
and sought to assert inheritance rights. (30)

Finally, notions of charity unacknowledged and gratitude violated
are captured in an insult commonly bandied about in popular discourse,
that of the huacho mal agradecido, or "ungrateful huacho."
Deriving from the Quechua word for adultery, the term huacho in
nineteenth-century Chile referred to someone born out of wedlock, or
more generally, to a foundling, an orphan, or someone of dubious
origins. Generally derogatory, the term could be loosely, though
incompletely, translated as "bastard." (31) In essence, the
seemingly incongruous juxtaposition of ingratitude and one's status
as a huacho captures a fundamental characteristic of the condition of
minors without parents willing or able to rear them. It implied that
young criados lived off the benevolence of others and that such
family-less waifs were by definition indebted to a charitable
"protector" to whom they owed their very existence.

To summarize, the circulation of minors in nineteenth-century Chile
assumed many guises and served a variety of (often contradictory)
purposes for the parents, children, and caretakers involved in it. In a
society with high rates of female headship, the practice of
"mandando criar" was a survival strategy on the part of poor,
single working mothers, even as it provided a form of security for the
aging women on their own who fostered their children. In a society
governed by rigid inheritance laws and notions of honor, it allowed the
wealthy to protect the patrimony and honor of legitimate scions against
the claims of extra-marital offspring, even as it served as an informal
mechanism for childless women and couples to acquire heirs of their own.
Finally, in a society characterized by widespread poverty and social
inequality, it provided for the basic needs of many destitute children,
even as it served to reproduce the cycles of dependence in which they
and their families were trapped.

The Casa de Huerfanos of Santiago

Practices of child circulation thus encompassed a broad range of
functions and experiences. But one common condition characterized all of
the arrangements described thus far: their informality or
extra-legality. Whether it involved wet nursing, apprenticeship,
fostering, or domestic service, the transfer of a child from one
household to another was almost never legally formalized. (32)
Meanwhile, adoption did not exist in civil law: Chilean family law
recognized only ties of "blood," to invoke contemporary
parlance, and not those based on fosterage or other forms of fictive or
spiritual kinship. (33) If adoptive sons and daughters were sometimes
designated heirs by Chilean testators, the elaborate laws governing
inheritance recognized no inherent rights on their part. In short,
neither the Chilean state--nor, for that matter, the other pillar of
institutional authority in this society, the Catholic Church--exercised
formal authority over these practices. (34) The informality of these
arrangements contrasts, therefore, with a second crucial circuit of
child redistribution that will be described in this section: that
mediated by state-financed and religiously-administered orphan asylums,
the largest and most important of which was Santiago's Casa de
Huerfanos.

Founded in 1758, the Casa de Huerfanos was for a century both poor
and poorly organized. The year 1853 marked an important milestone in the
institution's history. In that year, the city's welfare board
turned care of local orphans over to the Sisters of Providence, a
congregation of French-Canadian nuns who had recently arrived in Chile.
(35) The Casa, as the asylum was known, remained part of the
state's beneficence structure, and a significant portion of its
budget derived from public funds. But its day-to-day activities were run
by the nuns until the 1940s, when secular authorities took over. In the
late nineteenth and early twentieth century, outside of the public
hospitals and clinics, the Casa was the largest welfare institution
overseen by the state in terms of both clients served and pesos
disbursed. It was also the most significant of the far-flung charitable
activities that the Sisters of Providence would come to administer in
Chile.

Over the latter half of the nineteenth century, the orphanage
received burgeoning numbers of youngsters. At the beginning of the
1880s, the Casa supervised more than a thousand children each year. Ten
years later, the number topped 1,300. In the first decade of the
twentieth century, the population swelled to 2,300 children. (36) A
retrospective history of the Congregation of the Sisters of Providence
estimated that between 1853 and 1924, over 51,600 abandoned children
passed through the asylum's doors. (37) One turn-of-the-century
statistician calculated that for every thousand inhabitants of the city
of Santiago, nine were in the Casa de Huerfanos. (38) Or put still
another way, according to the conclusions of historian Manuel Delgado,
the proportion of children born in Santiago who were deposited at the
city's foundling home hovered in the late nineteenth century
between 5 and 9 percent. (39)

In fact, such figures reflect only a portion of all minors
committed to church-, state-, or privately-administered welfare asylums
in late-nineteenth-century Chile. While Santiago's Casa de
Huerfanos was the oldest, largest, and best-known institution for
children, the final decades of the nineteenth century witnessed the
rapid multiplication of other establishments dedicated to a parallel
purpose in Santiago and around Chile. Between 1844 and 1895, at least
thirteen institutions for poor children were founded in the capital
alone. (40) By 1912, one thesis writer calculated that the city housed
some 25 orphanages (casas de huerfanos). (41) There were surely others,
which due to their small size, short-lived existence, or private and
autonomous management, left no documentary trace. Meanwhile, in the late
nineteenth century, such institutions began to appear with increasing
frequency in provincial locales, including Concepcion, Valparaiso,
Limache, Quilpue, Quillota, La Serena, Chillan, Talca, Temuco, Linares,
Vicuna, Ovalle, and Antofagasta. While a lack of data makes it
impossible to hazard even a rough guess as to the numbers of minors
committed to these asylums, it is clear that around the turn of the
century, a significant and growing number of minors in Chile spent some
portion of their childhood under the auspices of one or another
charitable institution.

Who were these children? Again, we know next to nothing about most
of those served by these institutions. The exceptions are the hijos de
la Providencia, the children of Providence, as the wards of the Casa de
Huerfanos were known. Thanks to the assiduous recordkeeping of the
Sisters of Providence and the orphanage's size and stature, a
voluminous documentary record makes it possible to reconstruct the lives
of the Casa's children.

Among these materials is a series of registries that contains
summary information on the origins, age, family identity, and ultimate
fate of each child who entered the Casa, data that have served as the
basis for a thorough macro-analysis of the Casa's wards. (42) Even
richer in detail are the "Entry Books," files that include the
baptismal certificates, notes, letters, and even good luck charms left
with children deposited at the home. Also useful are the "Wet Nurse
Books," registries of the wet nurses who cared for young children
outside the institution. Finally, several volumes of "Exit
Books" contain information relating to transactions in which
private citizens received children from the asylum as apprentices,
servants, and adoptive sons and daughters. (43) Taken collectively,
these sources provide information about the childrens' identities
and that of their families, their social and geographic provenance, the
circumstances of their abandonment, their infancy among the wet nurses,
their sojourn in the Casa, and their distribution to private households
in Santiago. While the documents focus inordinately on the moment of
abandonment and the circumstances surrounding it, they also make it
possible to reconstruct, at least partially, more longitudinal
narratives of some childrens' lives as they evolved both before and
after their arrival at the Casa.

As Manuel Delgado has demonstrated, the vast majority--upwards of
eighty percent--were illegitimate. (44) The records further show that
minors arrived at the institution because of family crises, orphanhood,
and above all due to the poverty of their families. Many youngsters
originated in the poorest of social sectors, the children of single,
abandoned, and widowed women who led a precarious existence on the
margins of urban society. At the turn of the century, a third of
children arriving at the asylum had been remitted from the Hospital de
San Borja, Santiago's public maternity hospital, which served the
city's poorest parturients. (45) Poor parents' access to the
Casa was clearly mediated by patronage: children often entered with
letters of "recommendation" from their parents' masters,
mistresses, as well as priests, local judicial authorities, or charity
workers, who pleaded the child's case before the nuns. A few
children, accompanied by anonymous letters tacitly or explicitly
identifying them as the illegitimate off-spring of "decent
families," depart from this social profile, but they were clearly
the minority. In short, the portrait of the "children of
Providence" that emerges from the documentation resembles that of
foundlings in many other societies. What is more, it is also
indistinguishable from the profile of children who circulated informally
in Chile, as reconstructed from judicial and notarial records.

This similarity suggests that, perhaps not surprisingly,
Santiago's foundling home and informal modes of child circulation
served similar constituencies and fulfilled parallel purposes. Coupled
with the evidence that child welfare asylums expanded around the turn of
the century, exactly when, as noted above, fostered children disappear
from wills, it might further suggest that the institutional provision of
welfare replaced the informal "kindness of strangers," as
Boswell implies for medieval Europe. Cast in these terms, the story of
child circulation in Chile becomes a familiar narrative in which the
expansion of a formal welfare apparatus is associated with the decline
of traditional modes of social provision.

But a closer examination of the evidence tends to refute such an
interpretation. For one, evidence for the decline in informal fostering
practices is inconclusive. Though fostered children are conspicuously
absent from turn-of-the-century wills, judicial records indicate that
practices of rearing unrelated minors survived, even thrived, into the
twentieth century. (46) More importantly, an examination of the everyday
operation of the Casa de Huerfanos, and a closer look at the children
deposited therein, reveals that differentiating
"institutional" and "extra-institutional" modes of
child circulation as discrete and mutually exclusive is misconstrued. In
fact, in Chile, these two modes of circulation had long been dynamically
interlinked, complementary, and even mutually reinforcing. What is more,
rather than undermining "traditional," informal charitable
practices, the formal, state-financed, church-administered welfare
provision of the Casa de Huerfanos may well have strengthened these
practices.

The Casa and the circulation of infants

For more than thirty years, questions about the depth and nature of
parental (and especially maternal) affect have animated the study of
family and childhood in the European past. One line of argument holds
that parental bonds to very young children were shallow and that in an
era of high mortality, parents only became attached to their offspring
once children had crossed what Philip Gavitt has termed "the
threshold of vulnerability," at around age two. (47) The fact that
foundling homes were repositories of disproportionately young children
appears to lend credence to this claim. (48)

The majority of Santiago's foundlings were also very young
infants: from the period 1875 to 1915, 72 percent of children were less
than a month old. (49) But viewed from the perspective of child
circulation, the propensity to abandon young infants to the Casa de
Huerfanos may be read as reflecting less the emotional calculus of
Chilean parents than the simple logic of child mobility. As the previous
discussion indicates, children of all ages circulated beyond their natal
households. But babies presented a problem. Placing very young children,
especially nursing infants, with foster caretakers implied payment for
the service. Time and again, letters left with children at the Casa
painted scenarios of poor, working mothers unable to care for their
infants personally who either could not find or could not afford wet
nurses. (50) The problem is not surprising given that they were pitted
in competition with wealthy families for these very same services.
Meanwhile, youngsters over 5 or 6 years of age could earn their keep as
servants. This meant that poor families sent working children to private
house-holds but were either inclined or obligated to send their youngest
children to the Casa, with its access to a vast network of available
nurses and which accepted them for free.

As a result of these realities, the foundling home took on a
disproportionate share of the youngest of circulating minors. How these
dynamics played out is particularly well illustrated in a letter that
accompanied a baby deposited at the Casa de Huerfanos in 1899. "The
child ... is the son of Juan Hernandez and Maria Espinosa," wrote
Sara Reyes de Llona, the wife of an hacendado. She continued:

He is the last of 11 children and the mother died ... in childbirth.
His father, a tenant farmer on Rosal, my husband's estate ... is a man
who is always drunk and ... three weeks ago he abandoned them
completely and since the family is so numerous and they do not have
anyone other than an old woman who is accompanying the child and is
their great aunt, I thought it the case to send this little one to the
Casa ... because the others have been distributed among different
persons, and I took one for myself. (51)

The missive lays bare the vicissitudes of mortality, poverty, and
abandonment as well as the role of the Casa de Huerfanos in confronting
these crises. But what is particularly noteworthy about the scenario it
chronicles is that of the eleven orphans left in the wake of the
household's disintegration, only the youngest one is sent to the
Casa. The others are absorbed through informal mechanisms of
circulation: one is taken in by the wife of the hacendado and the rest
are perhaps distributed to other tenant farmer households--households
that had reason to value the presence of young, unpaid dependants. (52)

In this scenario the Casa complemented active informal trajectories
of child redistribution, but it only assumed responsibility for a small
sliver of the total volume of circulating minors--the very youngest
ones. Thus, it was not that parents were more disposed to part with
their infant children, as the theories of maternal affect would suggest;
it was that older children were wont to circulate along alternative,
extra-institutional trajectories. (53) (The Casa de Huerfanos' own
regulation, which officially--though not always in practice--prohibited
the entry of children over age seven, both reflected and reinforced this
division.) Thus, the fate of the eleven orphans illustrates the
significance of informal practices of child circulation and the
necessity of evaluating the labors of the Casa de Huerfanos within that
broad context.

Formal and informal circuits of circulation were not just
complementary, however; they were also dynamically interconnected. The
conduits carrying minors into and out of the asylum were directly linked
to the popular, informal, ones described above. The Casa's
documentation reveals that many foundlings had in fact been separated
from their natal families long before they actually arrived at the
institution. This suggests that for many children the asylum was merely
one stop on a longer trajectory of circulation that intersected only
intermittently with public welfare structures. A particularly common
scenario was for babies to be remitted to the Casa by the caretakers
their parents had hired to care for them but whom they had failed to
pay. Manuel de la Cruz Mosquiera was deposited in the Casa in 1883 with
a letter from a provincial judicial official stating that his widowed
father had sent the boy to be cared for by one Mercedes Quezada. But
"he left this place, going south of Talca and ... for the last four
months no news has been had of him." Quezada in turn sought to give
the child to the asylum "because she really believes he will not
return, since he is a migrant peon and a depraved father" and
because she could not afford to maintain the boy herself. In such cases,
the child's arrival at the foundling home represented the
continuation of a process of mobility that had already begun with
informal rearing arrangements. (54) It illustrates how, in the
experience of children like Manuel de la Cruz, informal arrangements and
institutional beneficence formed a seamless continuum.

Finally, institutional beneficence not only complemented or
intersected with informal rearing arrangements: the everyday modus
operandi of the Casa shows how the institution in fact capitalized on
these informal practices. In a period of widespread epidemics and
rampant infant mortality, when no reliable form of artificial feeding
was available, orphanages were ill prepared to house large numbers of
infants in close quarters. Thus, the Casa functioned like other
foundling homes in Europe and Latin America, relying on a network of
external wet nurses who were paid to take foundlings into their homes
during their first years of life. By the end of the nineteenth century,
the asylum in Santiago had developed a network of almost 600 nurses
comprised mostly of poor women living on haciendas around the capital.
Once children arrived at the asylum, they were remitted to these nurses,
who received a modest wage for caring for them. In other words, the Casa
circulated its wards to be reared in private households--exactly as poor
parents did. In the early 1880s, when statistics first become available,
only 200 of the institution's total population of 1,000 children
lived in the Casa itself. The other 800 resided in the homes of wet
nurses. (55) Over time, this ratio shifted, perhaps because, as
mortality rates declined, older children who no longer lived with nurses
accounted for a larger proportion of the institution's population.
Even still, in 1910, 40 to 50 percent of orphans at any given time--some
600 to 700 children--resided with nurses. The Casa continued to rely on
outsourced wet nursing into the early 1930s, and possibly later. In so
doing, it mimicked the widespread popular practice among poor mothers of
sending their children to nurses, as described in the first section. In
turn, rural women's willingness to receive the "children of
Providence" may be explained not only by the wage they earned but
also by their cultural familiarity with wet nursing and fosterage.

This familiarity, of course, extended to the parents of abandoned
children as well. Evidence indicates at least some parents treated the
wet nursing arrangements made by the Casa as essentially private or
informal, attempting to influence the asylum to hire a particular
individual as a wet nurse, seeking out regular contact with their
child's caretaker, and even contributing to the child's
upkeep. That is, the broader culture of circulation informed how parents
"abandoned" their children to the Casa de Huerfanos and what
became of these children thereafter. Take the experience of Clarisa del
Carmen, illegitimate daughter of Mercedes Campos, a seamstress, and
Alejandro Huique, a French cook, who spent several years of her life
under the tutelage of the Casa in the 1850s. Upon entering the asylum,
the infant Clarisa was baptized and sent out to the wet nurse Ana Maria
Tello, who cared for her for more than two years. But during the period
she was in Tello's care and, ostensibly, under the auspices of the
Casa, her parents were in frequent contact with their daughter and her
nurse. On two occasions, the baby's mother asked Tello to bring the
girl to visit her father, from whom she was estranged. According to
Tello's narration of events, "the two times that she brought
[the baby to her father], he gave [her] money, telling her to take good
care of [the baby]; and the second time she brought [the baby], she gave
a message from Dona Mercedes to Don Alejandro, asking him to send money,
which was to pay [Tello] for the girl's care." Two years
later, Campos resumed care for her daughter. While the young Clarisa del
Carmen was deposited at the Casa, baptized there, and sent to a nurse
contracted by the institution, her situation was otherwise
indistinguishable from many private and informal caretaking agreements
between parents and nurses. Not only did her parents maintain contact
with their daughter, but they evidently also helped finance her care.
(56)

A similar case is that of Jose Eujenio Bustos, the son of unmarried
parents of middling extraction, who was deposited in the Casa in 1844 or
1845, when he was several months old. According to the lawyer who
represented him in a filiation suit years later, "the wet nurse who
nursed him ... who lives on the hacienda of Lampa, went each month to
the house of Senora Iglesias [Jose Eujenio's illegitimate mother]
to receive her salary and to show the boy, who was given much attention
by his parents and other residents of the house." In this case,
although Jose Eujenio's parents maintained contact with him until
he was around 13 years old, and although they subsequently married (such
that he was automatically legitimated), they never reclaimed their son.
(57) In some instances, nurses and parents appear to have eventually
bypassed the Casa's mediation altogether, stymieing the
institution's attempts to keep track of its wards. In one case, a
father left his daughter at the orphanage, from which she was sent out
to a nurse. A year and a half later, the registry recorded that the Casa
had lost track of the girl but noted, "the suspicion is that the
nurse gave her back to her father." (58)

In these examples, parents who deposited their children at the Casa
de Huerfanos had not opted out of informal fostering arrangements in
favor of institutionalized forms of welfare provision: rather, they
recurred to the latter in order to construct the former. Additionally
noteworthy is the Casa's strikingly circumscribed role in the care
of these children. The asylum figured as little more than an initial
intermediary, a headhunter of sorts, in what in practice then continued
as a largely private caretaking relationship between parents and nurses.

In most instances, the issue was not so much recruiting a wet nurse
as paying for one. Take the case of the infant Jose del Carmen,
deposited at the Casa in 1859 by one Teodora Lobo. Following the
recurring pattern described above, Jose del Carmen's mother had
sent her son to be nursed by Lobo several months before, but since she
had not kept up with the monthly payments, Lobo took her ward to the
asylum. What is interesting about the case is that according to the
registry, the wet nurse who then received the boy from the Casa was none
other than Teresa Lobo--the original nurse herself. As the nurse of a
child who was now a ward of the institution, Lobo received a wage from
the Casa. In this way, the institution underwrote the rearing
arrangement established privately between Lobo and Jose del
Carmen's mother. (59) The case illustrates how, rather than
undermining informal modes of welfare provision, the Case de Huerfanos
functioned in a way that, probably inadvertently, bolstered these
arrangements.

Significantly, all of the cases cited thus far derive from the
1840s and 1850s, before or early on in the tenure of the Sisters of
Providence and prior to the explosive growth of the Casa's
population. It is difficult to say whether the institution's role
as mere intermediary for or underwriter to otherwise largely private
fostering arrangements continued in the face of these developments. Some
indications suggest that it did not. Anecdotes like those cited above
disappear from the record, implying that the institution may have
asserted a broader and more exclusive role for itself in its relations
with parents and nurses, with the effect that parents' contact with
their children and the nurses became more limited and wet nursing
arrangements became more "institutional." But if public
beneficence was no longer willing to oversee and subsidize private
provision of care, parents continued to solicit the Casa for just this
purpose. When Zenobia Ortiz sent her infant daughter to the orphanage in
1898, she identified herself as the "mother of a baby whom I put in
the hands of Providence since my family is very poor and cannot raise my
child." She went on to make a telling request: "I would ask of
the Reverend Mother the charitable favor that she give the care of this
baby to a senora of this place [Isla de Maipo, a rural area where the
writer lived], whom I will send with a good recommendation, so that I
can supervise her." And she concluded, "the affection of a
mother requires me to reclaim [the baby] within a year or two, paying at
that time the costs of her care."

The Casa ignored Ortiz's request to contract the nurse she had
recommended. (60) But her petition indicates that some parents continued
to recur to the Casa not in order to abandon their children but simply
in order to subsidize the private wet nursing arrangements they could
not afford. In depositing their children at the Casa, parents like Ortiz
did not necessarily choose institutional modes of beneficence over
informal arrangements but prevailed upon the former as a way of
constructing the latter. Meanwhile, even as the Casa appears to have
asserted a greater role for itself by rejecting the autonomy that once
characterized rearing arrangements under its auspices, it did not reject
informal or private modes altogether. The orphanage continued to
subcontract care of infants to the households of poor women,
capitalizing as it always had on the ubiquity of wet nursing and
fosterage in popular culture.

Circulation and child labor

The Casa's role in the circulation of minors was by no means
limited to its negotiation of wet nursing relationships between parents,
nurses and infants. It also orchestrated the circulation of older
children. At the end of the nineteenth century, some 80 percent of
children entering the Casa as infants died during their first years of
life. (61) Those who survived were remitted back to the Casa from the
homes of their wet nurses around age 5 or 6. But documentation suggests
their sojourns in the institution were exceedingly brief: after
returning from the nurses' households, youngsters spent a matter of
months, weeks, or even just a few days in the Casa. From there, they
entered a second cycle of circulation, for the ever-burdened Casa
outsourced the education and care of its older wards to private
households as well--this time, to those of citizens who solicited them
as servants, "companions," apprentices, and adoptive sons and
daughters. They were joined in this cycle by older children who entered
the Casa already weaned and who bypassed the wet nurses' homes
altogether. Though the Casa's somewhat confusing records make it
difficult to determine just how many children entered this way, one
registry shows that between 1894 and 1915, an average of around 72
children over the age of five were being abandoned to the Casa each
year. (62)

The petitions of prospective caretakers, who wrote letters to the
Casa or presented letters of patrons, provide an idea of who they were
and why they solicited children from the Casa. What is most noteworthy
about them is that they are indistinguishable from those who fostered
children in the context of informal circulation. For example, childless
couples frequently solicited wards of the Casa. According to an official
from their community, Dominga Morales and Ignacio Salinas were
"happily married and of good habits," had no children, and
desired to take out an orphan "as an adoptive child." (63)
Some couples pledged to bequeath a portion of their estates, however
modest, to an adopted son or daughter. Other common petitioners were
widows and other women on their own, of popular extraction but who
enjoyed a degree of economic independence. The parish priest in a
popular Santiago barrio characterized his parishioner, who solicited a
child, as "honorable, of good behavior and a good education"
with "a house of her own, worth ten to twelve thousand pesos."
The woman was childless, and her "sentiments of piety and
honorability" guaranteed "a favorable future" to the girl
she hoped to receive. (64) There were also artisans who sought out young
apprentices, among them a chocolatier described as an "honorable
and hardworking artisan" with "a room of his own" on Lira
Street, who requested a youngster to "give him an education and
teach him a trade." (65) Likewise, another artisan wrote his own
letter, soliciting "one of the bigger ones" and explaining to
the administrator, "for some time I have desired to remove a child
from the Casa de Huerfanos to educate him and [have him] serve me, in
order later on to teach him my trade of bookbinder." (66)

Moreover, just as in the case of informal rearing arrangements,
many of the Casa wards were solicited as domestic servants, often
explicitly. One well-placed couple desired a child from the Casa to
place in their house "as a servant and with the obligation to feed,
cloth, and give him/her the corresponding education until s/he is able
to be on his/her own...." (67) Similarly, the administrator of the
women's prison in Santiago asked his counterpart at the Casa de
Huerfanos to give him "two young boys for service, one for me and
the other for my son," the director of a school in rural Colchagua.
(68) The same petitioner then wrote letters on behalf of others,
including a dependent who also desired "a little orphan for his
service." (69) Evidently, those seeking servants hailed from a
range of social backgrounds.

Thus, the profile of solicitants to the Casa echoed that of
caretakers who participated in informal networks of child circulation.
One difference between the two groups does emerge, however: those
recurring to the Casa were either personally known to the administrators
of the Casa or in local Santiago society, or else they had
patrons--parish priests, employers, judicial authorities from their
local community--who vouched for their status as moral and upstanding.
Access to the Casa's wards was therefore mediated by patronage,
whereas obtaining a child through informal networks required no such
connections and was therefore more open to the humble and poorly
connected.

As the orphan population grew, the Casa actively recruited
households to take in children. In November 1866, the administrators
placed ads in the principal newspapers of the city imploring readers to
recur to the asylum for orphans. Citing the orphanage's burgeoning
population, overcrowded conditions and lack of funds, as well as its
primary responsibility for infants, they appealed to "charitable
persons who wish to assume care for some of the [older]
foundlings." In a strategy paralleling the reliance on wet nurses,
the Casa drew on the cultural familiarity of informal fostering
practices in order to place youngsters in the households of
santiaguinos. The appeal to "charitable persons" further
played to prevailing notions of fostering as an act of charity. Thus,
the institution capitalized on informal, popular practices of child
circulation and the discourses of benevolence that undergirded them in
order to provide care for its wards. In so doing, the Casa participated
in, and perhaps lent legitimacy to, the informal networks for
distributing child labor in which households of all social levels
participated.

In time, the private fosterage system would be altered somewhat as
the Casa's resource base and educational objectives expanded. In
1885, a larger facility was inaugurated in order to accommodate
ever-growing numbers of abandoned children. At the same time, the asylum
developed a more ambitious mission, seeking to provide its wards with a
minimum of educational and vocational preparation. In addition to
rudimentary schooling, girls worked in domestic tasks that prepared them
to serve in private homes, while boys acquired a trade in artisanal
workshops that opened adjacent to the Casa in the late 1880s. By the
turn of the century, instead of spending only a few months, weeks, or
even days in the institution, as in the past, children returning from
the homes of rural nurses (or those entering the Casa for the first time
at an older age) tended to remain in the asylum for several years.

Despite these changes, however, the basic modus operandi of the
Casa remained essentially unchanged. While children now spent more time
living in the asylum and acquiring at least the rudiments of an
education, many were eventually still sent out to private households
that solicited them as domestic servants. As Mother Superior Bernarda
herself noted in her history of the congregation, published in 1899:
"the same thing that happens now happened then. In times of
scarcity or want, the petitions to obtain ... [an orphan] ...
multiplied, with each [petitioner] having the idea of shaping [the
orphans] in their own way and making use of their services."

This was especially true of girls, whose principal destiny
continued to be domestic service. A log recording the post-institutional
fate of older children who had entered the Casa in the period from 1894
to 1915 (70) shows that just over 19 percent of them "went out to
serve" (salio a servir). But over 40 percent of girls were recorded
thus (most boys--some 59 percent--were remitted from the Casa to the
institution's affiliated artisanal workshops). At the time of their
placement in service, most girls were adolescents--their average age was
almost 15--but they ranged in age from 9 to 23.

Such figures, however, surely underestimate the numbers of children
placed in domestic service. The logbook records other children (some 9
percent of the total; but 14 percent of girls) simply as having
"left" (salio) or as having "left with senora X." It
seems very likely that some, if not most, of the children so ambiguously
designated had also been placed in service (especially since twice as
many girls were recorded as having "left," and the frequent
designation of an unrelated "senora" who received them is
suggestive of a mistress). Yet another group of children (almost 6
percent of the total; and almost 10 percent of girls) were listed as
having been adopted (salio adoptado). But given the cultural elision of
fostering and servitude, and the fact that domestics were also
metaphorical daughters, it would not be surprising if some of these
children were actually laborers in their adoptive households. Indeed,
the Casa administrator's private correspondence from the 1890s
refers to a girl sent out at age nine or ten as an "adoptive
daughter" but who, it is clear from his letter, actually worked as
a servant. (71) The average age of adoptees was significantly lower than
that of adolescent servants--just under 8 years old. It may be that
"adoption" was in some instances a clever means of obtaining
younger (and ostensibly more docile or pliant) servants from the Casa.
(72)

Another telling piece of evidence about the destiny of the sons and
daughters of Providence are a series of "adoption" contracts
issued to caretakers who sought children from the Casa in the 1920s and
early 1930s. The contracts deal with much younger children, and
presumably represent a subset of all youngsters leaving the institution.
Indeed, the fact that a third of them involved children under age two
suggests that applicants may well have sought them as hijos and heirs.
(73) But the fact that almost half of them involved minors who were at
least 6--the traditional age at which poor children were formally put to
work--suggests many more were in fact being taken in as laborers. (74)
Even more striking, the contracts indicate that, for the subset of
contracts in which information on the location of the adopting household
is included, almost 70 percent of girls were taken in by urban
households, whereas just over 53 percent of boys went to urban
households. (75) Given that urban domestic labor tended to be female,
whereas rural labor favored males, the geographic discrepancy reinforces
the impression that children sought as "adoptive sons and
daughters" were in fact being incorporated, in some status or
another, as laborers.

The exploitation experienced by youngsters who circulated
informally often characterized arrangements overseen by the Casa as
well. In her history of the congregation, Mother Superior Bernarda Morin
noted, "Many people affirmed that the purpose of the Casa ... was
to raise servants for the comfortable class of society, and not just any
servants, but robust and healthy ones, with no needs or
defects...." (76) She went on to describe a particularly repellant
custom in which individuals seeking child servants arrived at the Casa
and inspected hundreds of orphans, who were lined up "like a herd
of defenseless little lambs." Eventually, the nuns eliminated this
"degradation, too humiliating for the human race," but they
had little control over the "condition of slaves" that
characterized children's status in the homes of their masters. The
Casa administrator voiced similar concerns, declaring:

Placement in domestic service is the best option we have. [But] for
this one has to close one's eyes to the sufferings to which those who
must do it are exposed. With the awareness that it is really slavery,
one must submit to the hard necessity of giving away some girls who
are older and who are of an age at which they can take care of
themselves, to make room for so many others in the Casa. (77)

Other sources further attest to the violence to which these
children were subjected. The autobiography of a man who spent his
childhood in the Casa de Huerfanos in the 1860s recounts the severe
abuse he and other orphans suffered at the hands of a priest who
regularly "adopted" youngsters from the institution. (78)
Judicial and newspaper sources record the murders of at least two
adolescent orphans from the Casa by masters and mistresses in the 1910s.
(79)

In short, the Casa de Huerfanos continued to provide orphan labor
to the households of Santiago and to surrounding haciendas into the
twentieth century. And once again, the nature of its operations belies a
clear-cut distinction, much less a simple progression, between
"informal" or "private" modes of social provision
and "formal" or "institutional" ones. Even as nuns
and administrators lamented the fate of the "children of
Providence" as criados in exploitive households, the asylum
replicated, and may even have lent a certain institutional legitimacy
to, the ostensibly "traditional" relations of dependence and
subordination implicated in child circulation.

Finally, if the Casa took strategic advantage of popular practice
by outsourcing the care of its orphans first to wet nurses and later to
foster households, private citizens were similarly tactical in their
engagement with the Casa. As already noted, parents and caretakers
capitalized on the administrative reach and financial resources of the
asylum when they sought it out as a headhunter for and underwriter of
informal rearing arrangements. Private citizens interacted with the Casa
in ways that reinscribed and reproduced informal trajectories of child
circulation in two additional ways.

The first involved the Casa's insertion in circuits of child
mobility that were not only informal but were patently illicit: those
involving the illegal trafficking of minors. While most children were
deposited directly on the asylum's premises, two off-site foundling
wheels operating in other neighborhoods of the city collectively
received several hundred minors each year. (80) In the 1890s, the Casa
administrator charged that these off-site wheels had become sites of
clandestine child trafficking, citing "denunciations that children
received in the wheel had been given to people who had requested them,
paying for them, [an act] effectuated, of course, without the knowledge
of the administrators." (81) Such reports suggest that individuals
seeking to obtain youngsters, very likely with exploitive designs in
mind, capitalized on the steady flow of children passing through the
poorly monitored periphery of the abandonment apparatus. (82) Here it
was not the Casa's institutional reach or financial clout that
buttressed informal modes of circulation but rather the shortcomings of
its administrative oversight that did so. It is of course impossible to
estimate the volume of this illicit traffic--such children were never
recorded in the logbooks of the Casa--but the administrator considered
it enough of a problem that he repeatedly called for the closing of the
off-site wheels. (83) This was yet another dimension of the Casa's
complex insertion within broad networks of child circulation.

Finally, and in a very different vein, parents and prospective
caretakers might avail themselves of the Casa as a site not of illicit
commerce but of just the opposite: legal formalization. Apparently, some
individuals recurred to the institution to legalize fostering
arrangements that were otherwise entirely informal. The youngster Olga
Diaz was removed from the asylum the same day she entered it in 1929. A
note on the contract that one Domitila Poblete signed in order to take
out the youngster explained, "this girl was only received in order
to give her to this person [Poblete] who adopted her, and she left the
same day." (84) In other words, whoever had previously maintained
the girl (probably her natal family) deposited her at the institution
with the sole purpose of transferring her to the foster mother Poblete.
In this case no obvious financial benefit accrued to either party
through the Casa's mediation. (85) Their reason for performing this
transaction through the foundling home may well have been the desire to
formalize in some measure, through the "adoption" the Casa
transacted, a custody transfer that was otherwise entirely informal and
extralegal. (86)

Indeed, the transfers of children overseen by the Casa were cloaked
in a mantle of fictitious legality captured in the ubiquity of the term
"adoption" in the institution's documentation. Throughout
the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, those who solicited
children, those who wrote letters of recommendation for them, and the
institution's own administrators invoked the term. Yet as noted
above, civil law did not provide for the legal institution of adoption.
(87) As in its role as recruiter and subsidizer of wet nursing
arrangements, in providing an institutional imprimatur for informal
fostering, the Casa de Huerfanos again served to buttress practices of
child circulation.

Conclusions

The literature on child abandonment in Europe and, more recently,
in Latin America has been motivated by several overarching questions,
including who abandoned children were, what prompted their parents to
deposit them at foundling homes, and why the practice reached such
massive proportions in some societies at particular historical moments.
The preceding analysis of Santiago's Casa de Huerfanos suggests
that examining foundling homes within the broad context of child
circulation may help shed light on these questions. Taking into account
the backdrop of child circulation helps to illuminate the cultural logic
of depositing a child at the foundling home from the perspective of the
parents who did so. Rather than an exceptional or deviant act,
abandonment needs to be understood as consistent with wider cultural
patterns and practices. In this sense, my findings echo recent
scholarship that has questioned the utility of "child
abandonment" as a category. (88) In a context in which many poor
children were not reared exclusively within their natal families, what
exactly constitutes "abandonment" in the first place?
Particularly in Chile, and in other Latin American societies in which
the circulation of minors was rampant, "abandonment" turns out
to be a rather spurious normative designation, less a discrete
phenomenon than an arbitrarily isolated sliver of a complex reality.

The evidence from Santiago's Casa de Huerfanos may also prompt
us to reevaluate the scope and significance of the institution of the
foundling home itself. When placed in the broader context of informal
modes of child circulation, modes with which it both intersected and
which it reinscribed through its own modus operandi, the Chilean asylum,
which received tens of thousands of children from the early 1850s
through the mid 1920s, suddenly seems smaller and less significant, its
scope and importance circumscribed. In some instances it seems to have
functioned merely as a recruiter or underwriter of wet nurses'
labor. For a significant part of its history, it maintained its wards
under its own roof for only limited sojourns, sending them out to the
private households of wet nurses and later to foster
caretakers-cum-employers. The Casa, in short, functioned not as an
orphanage in the sense of an institution that cared for children from
infancy to the age of majority in lieu of their parents, so much as a
clearinghouse for the distribution of children, and child labor, to
urban and rural households.

Yet the significance of the Casa's financial resources,
administrative reach, and institutional legitimacy should not be
underestimated. Its roles as contractor, mediator, and clearinghouse
were no less significant for being circumscribed. The evidence suggests
that the Casa facilitated child circulation among parents and
caretakers--arrangements that, in many instances, might not have been
possible without its intervention. The institution also turns out to
play a role in the formalization of fostering relationships that
otherwise enjoyed no legal legitimacy. Finally, in attracting large
numbers of abandoned children it could not adequately supervise, the
Casa appears to have contributed, however inadvertently, to an illicit
traffic in children.

This discussion poses a question: if the Casa in some sense
duplicated forms of welfare provision and labor management that private
households already provided, what purpose did it serve? Why did public
authorities for decades pour seemingly endless resources into the
institution? The obvious answer is that the Casa provided ready access
to a boundless supply of child workers of all ages and both sexes to the
households of elites and those who enjoyed elite patronage. Yet the
institution's significance for its backers and patrons cannot be
reduced to its role as a purveyor of child labor, however important that
role. Unwanted children were hardly a scarce good in nineteenth-century
Chilean urban and rural society; on the contrary, they were ubiquitous.
Both elites and non-elites would have had, and indeed did have, access
to them regardless of the Casa's activities. As noted above, many
children arrived at the Casa with letters of "recommendation"
from their parents' masters, mistresses, and other patrons. That
is, the well off were as wont to recur to the Casa to place the children
of the poor as to solicit them as laborers.

This fact suggests that the Casa must have served other purposes as
well. One important one, I would argue, was the opportunity it provided
elites to exercise conspicuous benevolence. While a full analysis of
this dimension of the Casa falls beyond the purview of this article, it
is worth briefly mentioning. In a culture in which charity to one's
subordinates was a crucial dimension of elite identity, and especially
elite female identity, the Casa provided a perfect opportunity for
public displays of beneficence. The masters and mistresses and other
patrons who placed children; the households who solicited them; and the
nuns, administrators, doctors and (after the first decades of the
twentieth century) professional social workers who ran the institution
were all bound in a time-honored ritual of conspicuous altruism towards
poor parents and children. Moreover, the Casa provided a forum for the
exercise of conspicuous beneficence on the part of the state itself.
Born of eighteenth-century enlightened Bourbon ideals of charity and
education, the Casa's founding reflected new ideas about the
state's responsibility for the weak and vulnerable. Expanded during
a period when social distances were widening and class relations were
becoming increasingly tense, (89) the institution provided further
opportunity for the state to showcase its concern for the poor and their
children.

Ultimately, this analysis of the Chilean Casa de Huerfanos speaks
not only to the cultural dynamics of child abandonment or the
institution of the foundling home but also to the historical evolution
of welfare provision. For more than thirty years, scholars of the family
working on diverse cultural and historical contexts have repeatedly
returned to an enduring tension: that played out between the
family's "traditional" private functions, on the one
hand, and the (often ill-intentioned or at least inept) public powers
that would usurp them, on the other. The tension is evident, for
example, in Jack Goody's well-known 1969 article on the institution
of adoption cross-culturally, in which he criticized the assumption on
the part of modernization theorists that state provision of services to
the needy were necessarily preferable to traditional modes of provision
through, for example, extended families. This same tension is invoked,
in more alarmist terms, in Christopher's Lasch's 1977 classic,
Haven in a Heartless World, which lamented the assault of the
ever-expanding "apparatus of mass tuition"--the health,
education, and welfare services of self-styled experts, planners, and
reformers--on the "haven" that is private family life.
Finally, a decade later, John Boswell's study of infant abandonment
in the ancient world echoed a parallel sentiment, concluding that the
institutionalization of welfare provision to abandoned children in the
late Middle Ages displaced the informal "kindness of
strangers"--with disastrous consequences for the children's
welfare.

The case of child circulation in nineteenth-century Santiago, Chile
affords a somewhat different perspective on the relationship between
public powers and private practices. It belies any straightforward
distinction between "traditional," ostensibly private, or
familial forms of social provision, and more "modern," public,
or institutional ones. What the Casa de Huerfanos suggests is that
public and private modes of provision were inextricably, even
synergistically, interrelated. Rather than undermining popular practice
or challenging popular beliefs, Santiago's foundling home both
relied on and reinscribed informal modes of social provision as well as
the "traditional" social relations of dependence and
exploitation that often undergirded them. Informal benevolence (or
self-interest) and public welfare efforts merged, as the institution
capitalized on the everyday practices of private households and popular
notions of charity in order to care for its wards. Surely the
institution's survival over the course of more than two centuries
is in part attributable to its success in harnessing prevailing popular
practices and enlisting the collaboration of private households of all
social levels in its mission.

ENDNOTES

I wish to thank the Social Science Research Council and Yale
University, whose support permitted the research project on which this
article is based, as well as Beatrix Hoffman and Elizabeth Kuznesof for
their feedback on earlier versions of this paper. An anonymous reader
provided valuable comments. I am very grateful to the personnel of the
Casa Nacional del Nino, especially the Director, Ms. Maria Cristina
Rojas, and Mr. Carlos Eduardo Sanchez Aravena, for their generous
collaboration with this research.

1. Among the best-known of the European monographs in English are:
Rachel Fuchs, Abandoned Children: Foundlings and Child Welfare in
Nineteenth-Century France (Albany, 1984); Philip Gavitt, Charity and
Children in Renaissance Florence: The Ospedale degli Innocenti,
1410-1536 (Ann Arbor, 1990); David Kertzer, Sacrificed for Honor:
Italian Infant Abandonment and the Politics of Reproductive Control
(Boston, 1993); Ruth McClure, Coram's Children: The London
Foundling Hospital in the Eighteenth Century (New Haven, 1981); David
Ransel, Mothers of Misery: Child Abandonment in Russia (Princeton,
1988); and Joan Sherwood, Poverty in Eighteenth-Century Spain: The Women
and Children of the Inclusa (Toronto, 1988).

5. See, for example, Ann Blum's recent work on the Casa de
Ninos Expositos in Mexico City: "Public Welfare and Child
Circulation, Mexico City, 1877 to 1925," Journal of Family History
23: 3 (1998), 240-271. The concept of child circulation has also been
applied to foundling homes in Portugal: Isabel dos Guimaraes Sa, A
circulacao de criancas na Europa do Sul: o caso dos expostos do Porto no
seculo XVIII (Lisboa, 1995). See also the contributions to Catherine
Panter-Brick and Malcolm T. Smith's edited volume, Abandoned
Children (New York, 2000).

6. Ann Blum's fascinating analysis of clientelism and
patronage in the operation of the Mexico City foundling home is one of
few such analyses. Blum, "Public Welfare ...".

7. John Boswell, The Kindness of Strangers: The Abandonment of
Children in Western Europe from Late Antiquity to the Renaissance (New
York, 1988).

8. These critics contend that abandoned children were subject to
higher rates of mortality than Boswell acknowledges and, more
importantly, that the attitude of their rescuers was characterized less
by kindness than by self-interest, since those who took in abandoned
children routinely sought to enslave, prostitute, or otherwise exploit
them. See Louise A. Tilly et al., "Child Abandonment in European
History: A Symposium," Journal of Family History 17: 1 (1992),
1-23.

9. These terms are used by Sa, A circulacao de criancas, 24. She
also characterizes them as "direct" and "indirect"
modes of abandonment.

10. On childhood in elite families, see Ann Twinam, Public Lives,
Private Secrets. Gender, Honor, Sexuality, and Illegitimacy in Colonial
Spanish America (Stanford, 1999) and Manuel Vicuna, La belle epoque
chilena (Buenos Aires, 2001). To be sure, elite children were routinely
wetnursed, in Chile and elsewhere, and Vicuna notes the crucial role of
servants in rearing elite children. But significantly, nurses and
nannies were brought into the household where they worked; the
legitimate children of well-off families were never sent out to them, as
they were, for example, in eighteenth-century France.

11. Such an observation, of course, runs counter to Marcilio's
observation about the scarcity of documents for the Brazilian case.

14. These conclusions are based on wills drawn randomly, in roughly
twenty-five-year intervals, from the Archivo Notarial de Santiago [vol
212 (1850), 538 (1875), 1940 (1900), 1645 (1925)] and the Archivo
Notarial de San Felipe [vol 50 (1850), 92 (1875), 118 (1896)]. Of
course, will-writers were not necessarily representative of the
community at large, deriving disproportionately from that segment of the
populace that was better off economically and had some patrimony to pass
down. What this means for wills as indicators of the dimensions of child
circulation is difficult to say. As will be discussed below, households
of all social stations took in children, though the poorest households,
which would not be represented among testators, were more likely to send
children to be reared than to receive them.

16. Thelma Galvez Perez and Rosa Bravo Barja, "Siete decadas
de registro del trabajo femenino, 1854-1920," Revista Estadistica y
Economia 5 (1992), 1-52, 16. Of course, the operative word here is
"recorded." Such statistics, derived from censal data, need be
taken with a grain of salt, especially since domestic service was not
always defined as a form of employment. See Elizabeth Quay Hutchinson,
Labors Appropriate to their Sex: Gender, Labor, and Politics in Urban
Chile, 1900-1930 (Durham, 2001), chapter 2, for an analysis of the
ambiguities inherent in data on women's labor in this period.

17. The impact of the Civil Code is discussed in Milanich, Children
of Fate, chapters 1 and 2.

18. Milanich, Children of Fate, chapters 1 and 2. Nazzari, "An
Urgent Need to Conceal," highlights a different strategy among
colonial Brazilian elites, who "fostered" the illegitimate
offspring of their own families but concealed their true identities.

20. Archivo Notarial de Quillota, 1875, vol. 153, foja 46. Note
that the references to Segundo Gonzalez's services, industry, and
work should not be read as indications of his servile status.
Nineteenth-century testators often used the language of
"servicios" to refer to the merits of their beneficiaries,
whether they were sons and daughters, spouses, adoptive children, or
others.

21. Milanich, Children of Fate, chapter 5. The scenarios recounted
in Chilean notarial records echo the adoption of minors by economically
independent women in sixteenth-century France, as described by Kristin
Gager, Blood Ties and Fictive Ties: Adoption and Family Life in Early
Modern France (Princeton, 1996).

25. This was the case, for example, in Contra Felisa Mallea por mal
trato de Victoria Cavieres. 1918. Tercer Juzgado del Crimen de
Valparaiso. UCAN and Jose Ramon Vidaurre con Beatriz Vidaurre sobre
impugnacion de lejitimidad. Julio 1901. Segundo Juzgado del Crimen de
Valparaiso. UCAN. There are even instances in which these patrones had
reared servant-parents before in turn rearing (and benefiting from the
labor of) the servants' children. As Gabriela Cisternas declared of
the orphan Isidro Dias, "this child as well as his mother have been
reared and attended to by me: I have been the true mother and his only
help after God." Cisternas rejected the custody claims of the
boy's maternal grandmother, who claimed she was "keeping him
for her service." Juana Ferra con Gabriela Cisternas sobre entrega
de un nino. 1885. Archivo Judicial de Valparaiso. Leg 1430, 19.

26. For an overview of the institution of life-cycle apprenticeship
in Europe, see Andre Burguiere and Francois Lebrun, "The One
Hundred and One Families of Europe," in A History of the Family,
vol 2, Burguiere, Klapisch-Zuber, et al, eds. (Cambridge, 1996).

27. Cases in which masters and mistresses were convicted of abuse
include Contra Andrea Martinez por heridas a Elena Martinez, menor. Mayo
1892. Primer Juzgado del Crimen de Valparaiso. UCAN and [Caso Puelma].
November 1894. Primer Juzgado del Crimen de Santiago, Caja 16,
provisional cataloguing system. This last case, which involved the abuse
of three orphaned siblings by their caretakers, became a cause celebre in the Santiago press in 1894. In another case the mistress was not
convicted, but the child was nevertheless removed from her custody:
Sobre lesiones a la ninita Maclovia Peralta. Agosto 1901. Primer Juzgado
del Crimen de Santiago. UCAN. Finally, in other cases, the charges were
suspended and the fate of the minor is unrecorded: Contra Felisa Mallea,
op cit, and Contra Manuel Mancilla por maltrato al nino Eduardo
Calderon. Julio 1919. Tercer Juzgado del Crimen de Valparaiso, UCAN.

31. For an extended etymological discussion of the term
"huacho," see "Apuntes sobre chilenismos y otros
vocablos," Revista Catolica, Tomo XX (1911), (no author), 649-51.
As the article notes, the term "huacho" was also used to refer
to animals not reared by their mothers, "especially domesticated ones that are raised in the home." The phrase "huacho mal
agradecido" appears in the Puelma case, cited above, and in Jose
Manuel Armijo con Jose Ignacio Silva, por calumnias e injurias. Gaceta
de los Tribunales, #2956,16 octubre 1889, 2903.

32. I located only a single example of a rearing contract in the
archives. It involved the permanent transfer of a young boy from his
mother's custody to that of an adoptive couple. Causa civil sobre
entrega de nino a dona Petronila Mendez. 1868. Archivo Judicial de
Talca. 7a serie. Legajo 422, 3. Apparently, the service contracts
involving child laborers that were customary in nineteenth-century
Argentina were not widespread in Chile. See Mark D. Szuchman. Order,
Family, and Community in Buenos Aires, 1810-1860 (Stanford, 1988),
chapter 3.

33. In its lack of recognition for adoption, Chilean civil law
mirrored civil codes elsewhere in Latin America, North America, and
Europe. Adoption was not recognized in most of these societies,
including Chile, until well into the twentieth century.

34. While the legal records cited above show that the judicial
system was at times called upon to mediate disputes that arose between
parents, children, and caretakers in the context of child circulation,
in fact courts rarely emitted decisions in these cases and never
developed a consistent jurisprudence in adjudicating them. See Milanich,
Children of Fate, ch 6.

35. On the history of the Sisters of Providence in Chile and their
work with orphans, see the memoirs of the Mother Superior, Bernarda
Morin. Historia de la Congregacion de la Providencia de Chile, Tomo I
(Santiago, 1899). Strictly speaking, the Sisters initially assumed
charge only of older orphans, who at the age of 5 or 6 returned to the
institution from the homes of rural wetnurses charged with their care
during their first years of life. In the 1870s, they also took over the
reception of incoming infants and their distribution to the wetnurses.
The wetnursing network is described below.

36. For an analysis of the evolution of the Casa's population,
see chapter 2 of Manuel Delgado Valderrama, Marginacion e integracion
social en Chile. Los expositos, 1750-1930, Tesis de Maestria,
Universidad Catolica de Valparaiso, 1986.

37. Anon. La Congregacion de las Hermanas de la Providencia en
Chile (Santiago, 1924), 45. The institutional tutelage of the Sisters of
Providence ended in the 1940s, but the Casa has continued to function as
an exclusively public entity up to the present day. Located on its
original site in the Santiago neighborhood of Providencia (which took
its name from the nuns), the institution is now known as the Casa
Nacional del Nino. It is among the oldest, if not the oldest,
continuously functioning social welfare establishment in Latin America.

38. Adolfo Meyer, Guia Medica de Higiene y Beneficencia (Santiago,
1902). The calculation was based on the assumption that Santiago had a
population of 250,000 inhabitants.

39. Delgado, Marginacion e integracion, 55. Unlike in some European
studies of abandonment, Delgado corrects the calculation to exclude
those children--approximately ten percent of the total--known to have
been born outside the city.

40. These included the following: el Asilo de Salvador, la Casa Talleres San Vicente de Paul, la Casa de Maria, el Patrocinio de San
Jose, la Casa de Santa Rosa, la Casa de la Veronica ("Santa Maria Salome"), an apparently unnamed Casa de Asilo located on calle de
Davila, la Casa de Belen, la Casa de la Purisima ("Asilo de
Nazaret"), el Asilo de la Patria, el Asilo de la Misericordia, el
Asilo del Carmen, and la Protectora de la Infancia (also known as
"la Protectora" or "la Santa Infancia"). This tally
was compiled from mention of the institutions in newspapers, the census,
ministerial archives, ecclesiastical records, and various contemporary
publications on charitable activities. This calculation includes only
those asylums that provided residence to children assumed not to have a
family willing or able to take care of them. It does not include the
schools, clinics, and other institutions directed at poor children who
lived with their families (or other families).

41. Moises Poblete Troncoso, Lejislacion sobre los hijos ilejitimos
(cuestion social). Memoria de Prueba. Facultad de Leyes i Ciencias
Politicas de la Universidad de Chile. (Santiago, 1912), 24. The author
indicates that he received this information from the Oficina Central de
Estadistica, although it is unclear how the number was calculated.

42. Manuel Delgado, Marginacion e integracion.

43. Entry and exit files exist intermittently for the period from
the 1870s to the 1930s. I have located only a single volume of the
Wetnurse Books, which corresponds to the late 1850s and early 1860s.

44. In the final decades of the nineteenth century and first
decades of the twentieth, illegitimacy rates among Casa children ranged
from 78 to 90 percent. Delgado, Marginacion e integracion, 132.

45. Memoria de la Casa de Huerfanos, [MCH], 1899, 1900, 1907.

46. On the ambiguous evidence regarding trends in fostering
practices over time, see Milanich, Children of Fate, 285-292. The gist
of this discussion is that the disappearance of fostered children from
Chilean wills may reflect less changes in practices of circulation than
it does other, extraneous factors, such as changes in will-writing
protocols or the changing profile of testators. Meanwhile, judicial
records suggest striking continuities in practices of circulation
through at least the first decades of the twentieth century.

47. Gavitt, Charity and Children, 19. Of course, some scholars
argued for a reverse causality, in which parental indifference was
actually a cause of high mortality rather than a result of it. See
Edward Shorter, The Making of the Modern Family (New York, 1975),
chapter 5, especially 203-4.

48. Over half of those who entered the foundling home of Paris in
the mid-nineteenth-century were less than a month old, and some 90
percent of children admitted to the Ospedale degli Innocenti in
Renaissance Florence were less than three weeks old. Fuchs, Abandoned
Children, 64; Gavitt, Charity and Children, 188. In one of the classic
expositions on maternal sentiment, Shorter takes "the frequency
with which lower-class women exposed newborn infants" as "a
reasonable guide to the lack (or presence) of maternal affection."
Shorter, Making of the Modern Family, 192.

49. An additional 14.5 percent were less than three months old when
they entered the Casa. Delgado, Marginacion e integracion, 137-8.

50. As one mother wrote: "Out of charity [it is hoped that you
will accept the infant of] the unhappy bearer of this [letter], with her
paying each month whatever she can since she has no milk and cannot find
another nurse to care for him, since the one she had no longer wants to
care for him and forced her to take him back ..." Libro de
Documentos de Entradas [LE], 1873-1882, 141. Even more wrenching is the
semi-literate letter of another mother: "I haven't nursed her
myself because my milk dried up because of my suffering and also my
strength isn't enough to earn enough to maintain myself and dress
myself and pay four pesos and one real, which is what I pay for her and
so they haven't taken care of her for me I handed her over nice and
healthy and she has an [infected] navel and is all cosida [?] for lack
of my protection ..." LE, 1877, 1686.

51. LE, 1899, 14353.

52. The role of inquilino households in practices of child
circulation is discussed in Milanich, Children of Fate, 278-280.

53. Numerous letters echo this logic. The aunt of one child who
"has no father" and whose mother had died in childbirth wrote
to the Casa: "we beg the Sisters to do the charity of receiving him
in their Casa since we don't know what to do since he is so little
and we have to go around nursing him, and I as the aunt of the [mother
of the children] am taking charge of the two older girls." LE,
1873-82 [1879], 3050. And another wrote: "I am a widow ... and I
have three children and my circumstances oblige me to abandon my
youngest daughter who is around three months old ... and is not baptized
due to a lack of money." LE, 1873-82 [1874], 445. The orphaned Juan
Oliva, somewhere between 3 and 5 years old, entered the Casa in November
1902, because "it has not been possible to place him with someone
who could take him in," but his brothers, ages 12 and 18, were
"set up [ocupados] in some homes." LE, 1901-2, [1902], 4387.
See also LE, 1873-82, [1874], 445; LE, 1888, 7778, 8039; LE, 1896-8,
13339, 13616, 13637; LE 1901-2, [1903], 4396; LE, 1907, 5219, 5447; LE,
1912, 6414; LE, 1928, 2450, 2801, 2901.

58. Libro de Amas [LA], #7121. According to the wetnurse registry
from the 1850 and 60s, some ten percent of children were
"lost" with their nurses. The assumption was always that they
had died and their deaths had not been reported or that the nurses had
absconded with them. We can only speculate whether some of these
children had simply been returned to their parents without the
Casa's knowledge.

59. LA, #7574. The case raises the possibility that many of the
children remitted to the Casa by caretakers who had not been paid were
sent back out with these same nurses once the Casa had assigned them a
stipend. This is impossible to verify because, given the limited
information on wetnurses, it is generally impossible to know where
individual children were sent once they were deposited at the Casa.

60. In any case, three months later, the girl died. LE, 1898,
13639. Ortiz's request is echoed in a similar petition a decade
earlier, in which a mother asked the Mother Superior "... do me the
favor of writing me a letter ... indicating the name, street, and number
of the wet nurse who takes my daughter and in this way [I will have] the
pleasure of being able to see her and help her however I can." LE,
1885, 7296.

61. As late as the 1920s, the mortality rate still hovered around
75 percent. Salinas, "Orphans and Family."

62. Registro de Entradas, 1894-1915. This registry shows that
approximately 1,700 older children entered the Casa during the ten
years, 23 months recorded (entries are missing for a number of years).
Approximately half of these children were survivors remitted from wet
nurses' homes; the other half were newcomers to the institution.

72. Registro de Entradas, 1894-1915. The book is incomplete and
scattered months, and sometimes years, are missing. But the destiny of
some 1,700 children is recorded in the existing registries. Again, they
include both older children who had survived infancy with the wet nurses
as well as those who had been abandoned to the Casa system after about
age 5.

73. Some 77 of the 228 contracts in which the adoptee's age is
specified involve children under age two. While, as we have seen,
households took in even infants with the purpose of grooming them for
service, it seems unlikely that people recurring to the Casa de
Huerfanos for domestic servants, who had their pick of orphans of all
ages, would choose very young children. Also, several contracts refer to
the petitioners' intention to bequeath their possessions to the
child. This tally is drawn from the 239 contracts found in LS,
1922-1930.

74. Anecdotal evidence further supports this theory. In a request
from the 1920s, one woman sought to place a "criatura" (baby)
in the institution and to take out an eight-year-old girl to "be in
charge of" (para hacerse cargo de ella), LE, 17982. In another
note, dated 1927, noted feminist Elvira Santa Cruz wrote on behalf of a
woman who sought "un chico," a boy, from the Casa. The letter
described the prospective caretaker as married, with at least one adult
daughter, and living on an hacienda near Santiago. Given what we know
about those who took children in and their motives for doing so, the
petitioner seems a highly unlikely candidate for adopting a son and
heir.

75. An additional 16.8 percent of girls were adopted by rural
households and just over 13 percent were adopted by their wet nurses. As
mentioned above, most wet nurses lived in rural locales. As for boys,
over 29 percent went to rural households and just over 17 percent were
adopted by their wet nurses.

76. Morin, Historia, 234.

77. MCH, 1902, 49. After the 1880s, the boys were sent to the Casa
de Talleres, where they were trained as artisans until they left the
Casa. Much less is known about their situation upon leaving the
institution.

78. Pinto, P.N. [Pablo Perez], El Huerfano. Historia verdadera
contada por un exposito de la Casa de Maternidad de Santiago [Curico,
1898]. Perez claimed to have spent several years in the Casa in the
1860s. While some aspects of his autobiography are clearly fictional,
many details of his story are corroborated by internal documentation
from the Casa de Huerfanos. On the veracity of Perez's account, see
Milanich, Children of Fate, 179-80.

80. The foundling wheel was a contraption that existed across
Europe and Latin America, including Chile. It consisted of a wheel-like
device embedded in the wall of the orphanage (or other reception center)
in which a baby could be placed and then spun around to be received by
someone inside the building. A wheel on the corner of Alameda and
Maestranza Streets in Santiago operated in the 1880s, and probably
earlier. In the year 1885 alone, over 500 children entered the Casa
through this wheel. By the 1890s, this wheel was apparently no longer in
operation, but another one operated on Cerro Street, receiving 250-300
children a year. MCH, various years.

81. MCH, 1899.

82. It is not clear who exactly administered these wheels, but they
were not under the direct control of the administrators or the nuns.

83. The administrator urged that the off-site wheels be closed down
because "there are no resources to monitor them properly ..."
MCH, 1899; the MCH for 1897 also contains such denunciations. The
administrator also brought up the problem with his colleagues on the
city's welfare board, the Junta de Beneficencia.

84. LS, #752, 16 diciembre 1929.

85. Poblete was not a nurse and hence did not receive a wage from
the Casa. But nor did she leave the small "dowry" caretakers
often deposited for children in the 1920s and 30s, which might have been
an incentive for parents to transfer their children to others by way of
the Casa.

86. A parallel example is a document in which a local judicial
authority witnessed a mother's transfer of her infant to a woman
identified as a senora, "authorizing her to legitimate her as her
own daughter" and "promising not to reclaim her for any
reason." It is unclear what the Casa de Huerfanos had to do with
this transaction, but the fact that the document was filed among the
Casa's records suggests that the institution was somehow implicated
in the transaction. LE, 1912, 8713.

87. LS, 1922-1930. One administrative form listed the child's
name and the name of the person whom they were "adopted by."
Ann Blum makes a similar point about the Casa de Ninos Expositos in
Mexico City, which presided over adoptions in spite of its non-existence
as a legal institution in Mexican civil law. Blum, "Public
Welfare," 249.